Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ

OK - so I'm in the middle of the upgrade for the 2nd time tonight and wondering - how long should MFSCOPY take? The first time I was doing the copy it got down to 17.5 mins left or so and stayed there for about 20 minutes with no change. I decided that something must be wrong and cancelled it, shut down the computer, checked all the connections and started it over. This time I remembered to disable my anti-virus thinking that was probably my issue, but now it seems to be stuck at 18 mins left with AV disabled.

After I restarted it, I went browsing the forum and noticed that some people say this process can take a long time if you're USB connected, but I'm not. I'm upgrading my original TiVo HD 160 GB drive to a WD10EAVS 1TB Sata drive. The new drive is in an external enclosure, but that seems to be OK. I guess the question is how long should I wait until I figure this is not working? I intended to add my new Seagate 1TB to this once it's done, but I can use it for the internal drive if necessary. I just don't know what to expect.

If it's something most of us "lay people" can do it would be most welcome!

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If it is Intellipark doing it, I think that WD MAY send a program (on request???).

If I were to call them I might ask them if they could send me wdidle3.exe to run on a WD10EADS or EVVS, etc. They may say they have no idea what that program does or what you are talking about. I'm just sa'in.

OK - so I'm in the middle of the upgrade for the 2nd time tonight and wondering - how long should MFSCOPY take? The first time I was doing the copy it got down to 17.5 mins left or so and stayed there for about 20 minutes with no change. I decided that something must be wrong and cancelled it, shut down the computer, checked all the connections and started it over. This time I remembered to disable my anti-virus thinking that was probably my issue, but now it seems to be stuck at 18 mins left with AV disabled.

After I restarted it, I went browsing the forum and noticed that some people say this process can take a long time if you're USB connected, but I'm not. I'm upgrading my original TiVo HD 160 GB drive to a WD10EAVS 1TB Sata drive. The new drive is in an external enclosure, but that seems to be OK. I guess the question is how long should I wait until I figure this is not working? I intended to add my new Seagate 1TB to this once it's done, but I can use it for the internal drive if necessary. I just don't know what to expect.

Any ideas from those that have 'been there and done that'?

thanks,
d

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OK - so I've been stuck at 18 mins left for over 2 hours. While searching through the forum I found some people talking about theirs getting stuck and the general conclusion was that there must be an error on the original TiVo drive that prevents the MFSCOPY from completing. The article went on to suggest that I use the RESTORE feature of WinMFS to get by this.

I'm tempted to cancel this and try to proceed with the instructions as if it worked since WinMFS recognizes the format as a TiVo S2 or S3. I'm equally tempted to try it again with my Seagate as the target drive instead of this green WD drive. Of course, if the error is with the original TiVo drive, that would be pointless.

So - I intend to cancel this MFSCOPY and proceed with the instructions. Worst case, it doesn't work and I start over with a restore to the WD drive. At least I *hope* that's the worst case.

OK - so I've been stuck at 18 mins left for over 2 hours. While searching through the forum I found some people talking about theirs getting stuck and the general conclusion was that there must be an error on the original TiVo drive that prevents the MFSCOPY from completing. The article went on to suggest that I use the RESTORE feature of WinMFS to get by this.

I'm tempted to cancel this and try to proceed with the instructions as if it worked since WinMFS recognizes the format as a TiVo S2 or S3. I'm equally tempted to try it again with my Seagate as the target drive instead of this green WD drive. Of course, if the error is with the original TiVo drive, that would be pointless.

So - I intend to cancel this MFSCOPY and proceed with the instructions. Worst case, it doesn't work and I start over with a restore to the WD drive. At least I *hope* that's the worst case.

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OK - the early returns are in....

The system booted OK and it saw 318 hours of HD recording available...that's pretty sweet. All of my shows (15ish) showed up in "Now Playing", but only about 5 of them actually have content, so I deleted the rest (that's a bummer cause I had some Stevie Ray Vaughn in there and some Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, etc). Anyway - it's recording King of the Hill as I type and it appears to be working OK. I plan to put it back together proper now and see what happens. My original TiVo HD 160 GB drive is on the shelf.

In retrospect, I probably should've just shelled out $129 for the DVR expander and waited for them to have them in stock and ship. I really hate losing my SRV...damn.

OK - the early returns are in.... The system booted OK and it saw 318 hours of HD recording available...that's pretty sweet.

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Excellent! I'm wondering if the shows that were saved were on your hard drive before you connected your external drive?

In any case, although frustrating I'm glad you stuck with it. You can now relax because eventually you'll have so many recordings saved that you'll be so busy watching TV you won't have time for anything else!

Excellent! I'm wondering if the shows that were saved were on your hard drive before you connected your external drive?

In any case, although frustrating I'm glad you stuck with it. You can now relax because eventually you'll have so many recordings saved that you'll be so busy watching TV you won't have time for anything else!

Welcome to the (very) Big Boys Club!

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I may not completely understand your question..but...here's my answer.

I was tempted to put the single drive in and see how it looked before expanding to the 2nd drive. Since it was going to be so much trouble (physical location of the Tivo, etc) and since it was only a 1 minute operation to go ahead and add the 2nd drive - I decided to forego the intermediate testing.

All of my recordings on the Tivo we "live" recordings, meaning that none of them were in the Deleted Recordings folder. Ironically, the ones I lost included ALL of the ones that I had marked 'Save Until I Delete'

My original hope had been to put grow the TiVo's storage capacity (immediately) and eventually find a way to burn my recordings to a DVD, instead of a VCR. Which brings this question: Why in the world does TiVo still have a save to VCR? How do most people save their recordings? HDMI signal split to a DVD recorder? (I don't even know if an HDMI splitter exists...I'm just guessing it would.)

Thanks again Rich. The encouragement and info were both valuable components to the success of the upgrade.

Thanks, drey, for the sleuthing on the Intellipark/Soft Reboot issue and wdidle3.exe. This is indeed big! The Intellipark feature is not needed for our purposes anyway. I hope to be able to test this some weekend soon since my drive is a victim of this problem.

I may not completely understand your question..but...here's my answer.

How do most people save their recordings?

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I should have been more clear about the recordings saved/lost question. If there were recordings on your TiVo before you connected your external hard drive they would not have been lost when you divorced your external drive. I was just wondering if the recordings that survived your upgrade were made prior to connecting your external hard drive.

I think most people use TiVo Desktop or one of the other third-party programs like KMTTG (I use iTiVo) to transfer their recordings to their computers and then edit them (VideoReDo TVSuite is the #1 editor for Windows-based computers...one day they promise to have it for Mac's) and burn them to DVD. Or I'm sure some folks just transfer them to their computers and then burn them to DVD.

I guess Tivo has figured out that I'm not using the My DVR expander drive anymore. They just sent a survey to me questioning my experience with the drive and asked why I'm not using it anymore. I gave them a mouth full from how they seem to fail way too early and they doesn't work well with a Tuning Adapter. At least that was my experience.

I also begged they introduce a new system with the Tuning Adapter already built into the Tivo. I can't really complain..., since installing the new drive in my S3, no real problems with the Tuning Adapter. I do seem to be getting the occasional lockup of the system when I try to tune to a channel. And it's not always a SDV channel either. System just seems to lock up after the channel comes in with the guide stuck on the screen and then the Tivo reboots itself after a minute or so. Probably the Tuning Adapter. But that's an issue for another thread.

Thanks, drey, for the sleuthing on the Intellipark/Soft Reboot issue This is indeed big! The Intellipark feature is not needed for our purposes anyway. I hope to be able to test this some weekend soon since my drive is a victim of this problem.

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I ran wdidle3 today on (2) WD5000AVVS drives I purchased last month. They had soft boot problem before. I just disabled the timer and installed in (2) THD's and they work perfectly. Thanks for the info

I ran wdidle3 today on (2) WD5000AVVS drives I purchased last month. They had soft boot problem before. I just disabled the timer and installed in (2) THD's and they work perfectly. Thanks for the info

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You're very welcome! Glad to hear my information was useful.

On the side note, using steps that I described earlier will also allow you to use WD10EADS on original Series 3 without soft-boot issue.

I should have been more clear about the recordings saved/lost question. If there were recordings on your TiVo before you connected your external hard drive they would not have been lost when you divorced your external drive. I was just wondering if the recordings that survived your upgrade were made prior to connecting your external hard drive.

I think most people use TiVo Desktop or one of the other third-party programs like KMTTG (I use iTiVo) to transfer their recordings to their computers and then edit them (VideoReDo TVSuite is the #1 editor for Windows-based computers...one day they promise to have it for Mac's) and burn them to DVD. Or I'm sure some folks just transfer them to their computers and then burn them to DVD.

Enjoy!

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re: recordings that survived. I began this upgrade with an unmodified TiVo HD, 160 GB internal drive only, so ALL of my recordings were made prior to connecting an external hard drive. Since I still have the original internal drive (now on a shelf), one day, when I'm re-arranging all of my AV equipment around a newer, wall-mounted LED (or something better still) TV, I may drop the old drive back in and suck the recordings I care about out of it.

re: recording to DVD. I realized after asking the question that I should have looked elseswhere in the forum for an answer as I was moving off the topic of upgrades. Having said that, thank you very much for providing the information above. I had forgotten that TiVo Desktop was available. I had not used it for some time since I had it on my work laptop which has been replaced once or twice since then. I'll have to research the other things you mentioned. It's rare, but I do occassionally like to save something to DVD. Less rare is to put something on my laptop to watch when I travel.

Just like to thank everyone for all the information provided here and to the developers of WinMFS. Upgrading the internal drive worked really slick using a USB docking station.
Installing a WD10EVDS ITB has fixed my reboot problem, well so far so good.

Wow! Although the WD10EADS needs AAM settings lowered, they are less expensive than most of their counterparts. That's even better news!

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I don't know about the AAM part, as my WD10EADS is the quietest drive I've ever not heard, but wdidle3 has successfully fixed my soft boot problem on this drive. I'm using it in an HR10-250 currently, but it had the same soft boot issue that has been reported on the Series3. I performed the "wdidle3 /D" successfully (after much hassle). I think I'm now confident enough that I'm probably going to take and swap it out with the extremely noisy Seagate drive that I currently have in my Series3.

If anyone's looking for a boot CD that contains wdidle3, see here. It was necessary for me to go into my computer's BIOS and change the "SATA operation" to ATA instead of AHCI to get this to work properly on my PC.